ok...so i've written a substantial paper on classical southeast asian history with appleworks and i've got to the editing stage...all that's left is to edit some non-english text , for example: adding an acute accent to a capital 'S'. lo and behold...not all the charracters on the character pallet work in appleworks! apple support (fantastic as usual) were left with no option but to agree that i should save it as a word document and open it on my 'office test drive' for editing. this is a disgrace as far as i'm concerned. let this be a warning to those writing academic papers with non-english content on appleworks. useless.

I'd have to say the fact that you were able to finish the paper enough to go back to do the editing in AppleWorks is amazing. I've never been able to use it more than 10 minutes without it crashing. Although since Apple hasn't updated it in ages it's no wonder it runs so poorly.

I don't know if you are just complaining or if you want an explanation of what was happening... so I'll explain anyways.

AppleWorks was the first major application ported to Carbon to run in Mac OS X (we are talking about pre-release Mac OS X, ca. 1999).

So why does this matter?

First, there has been no major changes in the application since it was first released. Apple considers this to be a consumer app and it fills that need... generally speaking academic writing is considered to fall into the area of professional writing. So, while AppleWorks may be able to do most of what is required for academic writing, when it comes up short one would ask the user (in this case you) why you chose a consumer application for a professional task.

Second, Carbon applications are generally isolated from other apps and the system at large. As Mac OS X has evolved Cocoa apps are able to gain more abilities because they look to the system for many of them (like text services). Cocoa apps can also share features and abilities with other Cocoa apps. This sharing is not part of Carbon (which is based on the old Mac OS APIs which was pretty much devoid of sharing back in the pre-Mac OS X days), so consequently as Mac OS X has advanced Carbon apps like AppleWorks haven't gained anything.

So complaining that AppleWorks doesn't work (for your tasks) isn't going to garner you much sympathy. It has been at the end of it's life for years and has been relegated to the consumer market. It is part of the reason Apple gives it away for free with consumer Macs and why the price ($79US) is so low compared to other similar products like Microsoft Office (a professional application).

Well, school is for learning... and this sounds like it has been a learning experience for you, so it hasn't been a complete loss.

I agree with iGary to use text edit. If possible save up for word, its pricy but as a student it is a necessity almost.

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I'm a student, and Pages (part of iWork) suits my needs perfectly where I would normally use MS Word. Keynote handles any PowerPoint presentations I throw at it. The only thing I need AppleWorks for is opening Excel spreadsheets.

I love AppleWorks and use it for all my papers. Though I admit I have run into the issue where it won't display certain unicode characters from the character palette, it wasn't a big deal for me. I couldn't survive without the equation editor. Pages doesn't even support this and the Word version is terrible. As far as I can remember, in the 9+ years I've been using AppleWorks, it has never crashed on me--certainly not under OS X.

I love AppleWorks and use it for all my papers. Though I admit I have run into the issue where it won't display certain unicode characters from the character palette, it wasn't a big deal for me. I couldn't survive without the equation editor. Pages doesn't even support this and the Word version is terrible. As far as I can remember, in the 9+ years I've been using AppleWorks, it has never crashed on me--certainly not under OS X.

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Likewise. AppleWorks may have its limitations, but it's always been rock-solid for me.

Check out AbiWord. It looks way too much like MS Word for my tastes, but some people might actually see this as a virtue.

I don't know if you are just complaining or if you want an explanation of what was happening... so I'll explain anyways.

AppleWorks was the first major application ported to Carbon to run in Mac OS X (we are talking about pre-release Mac OS X, ca. 1999).

So why does this matter?

First, there has been no major changes in the application since it was first released. Apple considers this to be a consumer app and it fills that need... generally speaking academic writing is considered to fall into the area of professional writing. So, while AppleWorks may be able to do most of what is required for academic writing, when it comes up short one would ask the user (in this case you) why you chose a consumer application for a professional task.

Second, Carbon applications are generally isolated from other apps and the system at large. As Mac OS X has evolved Cocoa apps are able to gain more abilities because they look to the system for many of them (like text services). Cocoa apps can also share features and abilities with other Cocoa apps. This sharing is not part of Carbon (which is based on the old Mac OS APIs which was pretty much devoid of sharing back in the pre-Mac OS X days), so consequently as Mac OS X has advanced Carbon apps like AppleWorks haven't gained anything.

So complaining that AppleWorks doesn't work (for your tasks) isn't going to garner you much sympathy. It has been at the end of it's life for years and has been relegated to the consumer market. It is part of the reason Apple gives it away for free with consumer Macs and why the price ($79US) is so low compared to other similar products like Microsoft Office (a professional application).

Well, school is for learning... and this sounds like it has been a learning experience for you, so it hasn't been a complete loss.

Click to expand...

I posted to vent my frustration, yes, but appreciate the explanation so thanks RacerX. also, i posted so anyone else suffering the same problem could look at this thread in future...i made a cursory web search when i first encountered the problem and came up with nothing really.

why am i (the user) using a commercial application for a professional task?

When i bought appleworks err...a few years ago (post-OS X) i obviously failed to see the 'this is now a consumer word processor not a professional word processor' sticker on the box. or, if you're saying it was never a professional word processor i obviously failed to see that sticker too/instead. maybe [post-OS X?] the slogan should read: 'one application. finite uses'.

"...school is for learning..." sure, and when i was at school around 16 years ago i learnt that: "assumption is the mother of all..." (are they really teaching classical SE Asian history at schools these days?!?)

thanks for the textedit recommendations but you can't footnote on textedit (yes i didn't mention footnotes in my original post).

and yes, i've also found appleworks to be rock solid with the exception of the problem i cited.

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